Presumably, at least. How knows if the Steelers will double down on pass happiness and sign Mike Martz just to see how high I'm willing to climb to leap to my demise. Even worse, some are saying Jim Caldwell is a possible replacement candidate. What conversationsFor now, let's just celebrate Bruce Arians being gone forever. Granted, he wasn't the worst offensive coordinator...

****.Fuuuuuuuuucccccccckkkkkkkk.It's been readily apparent for weeks that the Steelers were too banged up and otherwise out of sorts to put together another bid for the Super Bowl. Most likely they were going to lose to New England in six days in Foxboro, but they should have enough - even with half the defense sidelined or compromised - to down a 8-8 team, even on the road.The...

Pretty sure this is graphic for a baby's bib. Whatever.My Grandma grew up on the mean streets of Sharpsburg, PA. She lived between a brewery and a cement factory. She worked at a bank for 40 years and only took 3 days off. When she "retired" she got bored, so she went to work at the snack bar at Hills department store in the Waterworks.Grandma is endemic of so much...

Unless the Steelers overcome injuries to pull another 2005-esque three-win playoff run on the road, the team is going to end up having its season come to close with a loss to either Tebow, the Patriots or Baltimore. None of those is particularly pleasant to contemplate. Being myth building fodder for the Tebow media machine might not be quite as bad as conceding a first playoff loss...

I haven't watched any reaction or sought any feedback regarding Monday night's loss in San Francisco. Not because I'm avoiding it because I'm overly crushed. Disappointed, to be sure, but this outcome was largely an expected one. I try to avoid live blogging Steelers games at KSK mostly because I'd like to focus on watching my favorite team play rather than moderating...

Just yesterday, I expressed doubts that James Harrison was going to be suspended by the NFL for his hit on Colt McCoy. There's no question that league executives have been waiting for an opportunity to levy this punishment on Harrison, but I figured they would have waited for a less borderline infraction. Guess not. I mean, since Harrison is such a VICIOUS MALACIOUS HEADHUNTER...

Looks like I'm guilty of a little blog neglect.Don't have much in the way of illumination from the two wins over four days last week. The victory over Cincy was as decisive and encouraging as the win over Cleveland was not. Don't want to bemoan the lack of style points in the Thursday win. The Steelers actually played that game well and Roethlisberger looked as sharp...

Bless you, Anthony Becht.A lot of comparisons are being made between last night's ugmo win in Kansas City and the equally putrid yet also equally victorious showing that the Steelers had in the beginning of the season in Indianapolis.And while I was one of the many down on the team after the win in Indy, I'm much less so after last night. Why? Because now, as opposed to then...

As far as the national media narrative, yesterday's Steelers-Bengals game was going to teach us more about Cincinnati than it would about Pittsburgh. Accordingly, we did discover that the Bengals are an upstart team worthy of its 6-2 start, but still a little ways off from challenging for the division.For the Steelers, a lot of it was reinforcement of trends that have been prevalent...

You know, you can only leave Torrey Smith open so many times before he's actually going to catch it. The Steelers learned that the hard way.For all the mocking we do of Joe Flacco, he's now led last-minute scoring drives to win at Heinz Field in consecutive seasons. It doesn't automatically make Bert an awesome QB or anything, but I'll give credit where it's due...

Last Sunday, the Steelers exacted their first measure of revenge against Tom Brady's Patriots in quite some time. About seven years, actually. Similarly, the Ravens, who had been tormented by the Steelers for the past five years (at least when a backup QB wasn't starting for Pittsburgh), finally got some payback of their own in Week 1.In both cases, I wouldn't say the...

I'm gonna be upfront - I had little faith that the Steelers could knock off the Patriots. Recent history has given little indication that Dick LeBeau had been willing to abandon the zone-heavy strategies that resulted in a host of humiliating Steelers losses to New England. Even in the best of seasons for the Pittsburgh defense, Brady had been able to make them look wanting....

Creating turnovers, getting consistently solid play from the quarterback and winning on the road. Not things we saw a lot from the Steelers early in the season, but it finally manifested itself Sunday in the desert. And none too soon. With the two-week gauntlet of AFC heavyweights staring them down, Pittsburgh could ill afford to drop one to Whisenhunt's Pittsburgh West.Granted...

There's really no bad way to win in the NFL, but the most agonizing is probably the way we watched the Steelers win yesterday, or how they did in the AFC Championship Game last year - by mounting a huge lead, only to watch it slowly erode as the seconds tick off the clock in the second half.Of course, that suggests that the Steelers simply went conservative and were content to...

The Jaguars are the kind of team that in recent years would have been almost expertly engineered to lose to the Steelers. An offense that needs the run game to thrive to have any chance. A quarterback not necessarily bad, but at least too inexperienced to exploit the holes in LeBeau's scheme that only Brady, Rodgers and maybe Brees have been able to with any consistency.Despite...

The Steelers, a month into the season, finally gave a performance that shows that they belong with any team in the league. None too soon, of course. Pittsburgh was coming into Sunday's game hard on the heels of a feckless outing in Houston that was made worse by yet another substantial injury toll.The Titans had been rolling prior to yesterday, even decisively beating the Ravens...

Busyness, rather than the understandable excuse of crushing despondency, kept me from writing about the Steelers' lifeless showing in Houston. For the sake of going through the motions, which seems apt right now - The Steelers sucked. They should lost by far more. They failed to capitalize when the Texans practically begged to lose. The O-line is laughable. Arian Foster's...

Wait. I'm seriously concerned that the Steelers might lose to the Texans? "This is not my beautiful house... This is not my beautiful wife..."It's not that I think the Steelers are uncapable or even all that unlikely to beat Houston. I've just yet to see the team put forth the kind of effort that I know that it should be on a weekly basis if it hopes to contend...

It's not often that a team comes away with a victory and ends up looking the worse for it, but here we are with the Steelers. Granted, I'll take the 2-1 start given how the team has played through three weeks, but unless there is marked improvement in the weeks to come, this team won't do much except prey upon the Seahawks and Curtis Painter-led Colts of the world.The...

The onset of Peyton Manning neck AIDS transformed what would have been an early season test for the Steelers into the second week of a two-week respite before that team has to travel to Houston to prove that it still belongs among playoff contenders after the Week 1 meltdown in Bawlmer.The Colts got rolled by said Texans in Week 1 and were decidedly beat at home last week by the...

Two games with wildly divergent outcomes against opponents of wildly uneven quality. That's what we have to base our current expectations of the 2011 Steelers. I hoped to learn something about the Steelers through Sunday's performance, and I did, though not quite enough to get a firm idea of where exactly they stand. It was a heartingly display, if not a very instructive...

Nothing like rebounding from a week of disappointment and Ravens fan gloating to hear that Bill Leavy has been assigned to Sunday's Seahawks-Steelers tilt. No way that gives cause to unbearably tedious Super Bowl XL officiating discussion from the announcers. At least Phil Simms won't be calling the game again. I'm sure by the second quarter that he'd be calling for...

Willie Colon had a strange and unexpected ascent two years ago. In 2008, Colon was the biggest liability on a much maligned offensive line that ended up being part of a Super Bowl champion, That year, Colon could be counted on for nothing much besides drive-killing penalties and an inability to read the pass rush.So it took many, including myself, by complete shock when Colon transformed...

The Ravens put a hurting on the Steelers today in a way they last, and maybe only did, in the 2006 season. Ironically, it was their first victory over a Steelers team starting Ben Roethlisberger since that '06 season.Depending on your knee-jerk reaction, the Ravens made all the right off-season moves, the Steelers are too old to compete, the Steelers were complacent, the Ravens...

To say that the Ravens underwent a complete roster overhaul in the off-season is a bit of a stretch, but the team did take risks (some commendable, others questionable) in replacing a few long-time staples in an effort to get younger and faster. Whether it's enough to finally vaunt Baltimore past the Steelers could determine what happens with much of the rest of the roster.Baltimore...